


In This Graveyard Of Promises

by capeswithhoods, impassivetemerity



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentions of Death, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-30
Updated: 2013-03-30
Packaged: 2017-12-07 00:01:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/741735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capeswithhoods/pseuds/capeswithhoods, https://archiveofourown.org/users/impassivetemerity/pseuds/impassivetemerity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The warehouse was familiar in ways that made Jason’s skin crawl, even though he knew there was no way it could have been the same building he had died in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In This Graveyard Of Promises

_The warehouse was familiar in ways that made Jason’s skin crawl, even though he knew there was no way it could have been the same building he had died in. For one, he was still in Gotham; he knew that without a doubt. But the more important difference was that the man who had him tied to a chair and was stalking around him with a crowbar was_  not  _the Joker.  
  
Not that Black Mask was any better, especially given Jason’s history with him and his predecessor, but it gave Jason something to focus on, something to keep him in the present instead of in a warehouse in Africa another life ago.   
  
“You know, I don’t think red is your lucky colour, Hood. Or should I call you Jason, since you seem to be absent your hood?” The question was punctuated by the straight end of the crowbar being drawn along the hard line of Jason’s jaw, lightly enough to keep from scraping him, but firm enough to make him feel the brush of cold, hard steel against his skin. Jason couldn’t see his face, but he didn’t need to to know that Jeremiah Arkham was smiling behind his hideous mask.   
  
“You’re a lot smarter than your namesake, I gotta give you that, but Hood’s fine. S’what all my friends call me,” Jason said, forcing his voice to stay strong, even though the mere presence of the crowbar was making him nauseous.   
  
Just as Jason finished speaking, Mask shoved the end of the crowbar up under the former Robin’s chin, forcing his head up with the dull prongs and making Jason shudder. “Speaking of your friends, I’ve been told to give you regards from one of your closest. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate. He told me all of your sweet spots, too. Ones that make you scream, in fact.”   
  
“Yeah, I’m not much of a screamer, sorry to disappoint.” It didn’t come as a surprise to Jason that Joker was involved somehow – after all, Mask had to get the details from _someone – _and Jason vowed to himself that he’d actually put a bullet in the damn clown’s head if_  – when –  _he made it out of there. Thinking about shooting Joker made it a lot easier to keep from being completely terrified by a thick piece of steel.  
  
“We can always test that theory.” A vicious curve in Mask’s voice indicated that he fully intended to do so, and it brought Jason’s terror back to the forefront of his mind. He knew he’d crossed Mask too many times for his threats to be anything but horribly real.  
  
“Or we could not and say we did. That sounds loads more fun and it makes you seem like a badass.” Jason hesitated, knowing he was pushing his luck, knowing he was terribly close to begging. “Not that you_ aren’t  _badass, because clearly you are since you got me here, so uh…” he trailed off and found his eyes fixed on the crowbar, unable to look away from the cruelly curved metal. “You aren’t buying this, are—“  
  
Mask yanked the crowbar away from Jason’s face, cutting him off by curling a leather clad hand around his jaw, making his words stop with a choked sound and the bones in his jaw creak audibly. “Not a chance, Mister Todd. I don’t need any help in the credibility department. I’ve driven Two-Face out of his own game. I singlehandedly brought down Arkham Asylum, and put Gotham on her _knees.  _This,” he motioned around the room with the crowbar, forcing Jason’s line of sight to follow the strip of metal, obviously taking pleasure in the former Robin’s panic, “Is merely for fun. I wanted to see what it could take to break one of the Bats. Of course it will send a message to the underbelly of the city and my colleagues, but you’re really just a pet project.”  
  
“I’m not one of them anyway,” Jason spat, his voice hoarse and words bitter, because despite everything, he still didn’t believe that he belonged with the rest of the Bats, and even if he did, maybe he could have convinced Mask that he didn’t. The last thing he wanted was the madman going after Dick once he was through with him. “So good luck with that, asshole.” Jason knew taunting a psychopath holding a crowbar was the farthest thing from his best interest, but even panic and the knowledge that he probably wouldn’t last until sunrise weren’t enough to tamp down his bravado.   
  
Mask released his grasp on Jason’s jaw, and then brought the crowbar up with a hard swing, slowing it just before it hit Jason in the face, turning it into a light stroke against his cheek. He laughed, a horrible sound echoing from beneath his mask as Jason let out a string of panicked curses, flinching away from the cold metal instinctively. “I don’t need the slightest bit of luck, not when it comes to you. I’ve managed to acquire extensive files about your stays in various institutions, some real page turners you’ve got there, Hood. Even if your doctors were uneducated hacks.”   
  
After the slightest pause, the crowbar was swung again, this time coming up in an arc toward Jason’s ribs and stopping short yet again, though the psychological response from the former Robin was probably more than enough for Mask to bask in. Jason couldn’t tell, obviously, but he was sure Arkham was grinning behind his mask while he flinched away from the crowbar, shaking and swearing. Fight or flight had kicked in hard for Jason, and even though he wanted to do nothing but run, he couldn’t, leaving him feeling as helpless as he did when he was twelve, though this time there was no reason for this mess, no mother to protect, no meaning other than a twisted doctor’s urges and no amount of self control could stop Jason from nearly hyperventilating.   
  
It happened again; the crowbar swinging and not hitting, leaving Jason shaking and cursing and almost wishing it would just _hit _. He knew what would happen when the crowbar finally connected_  – severe cranial damage, multiple broken ribs, punctured lung, internal haemorrhaging, all extremities broken in multiple places, ect. –  _he’d read his autopsy report enough times to have it memorised.  
  
“Fuck you!” Jason yelled. His voice was shaking nearly as bad as he was, and until then he hadn’t really tried escaping the chains binding him to his chair, knowing they were too secure, but now he couldn’t stop himself, no matter how useless it would be, especially with his panic clouding his objectivity.   
  
Unfortunately for Jason, the only response from Mask was to swing the crowbar again, this time connecting hard with a sickening_thud  _against Jason’s side. There was a crack, easily identifiable as a rib breaking, and Jason let out a strangled sound, stiffening in the chair before crumpling against the blossoming pain in his chest. “Stop wiggling, Mister Todd. My aim may start to slip, and we definitely don’t want that. It’ll only hurt_ more _.”_  
  
Two more false swings came after that, and Jason barely flinched at them, though when the metal connected with his collar bone, he let out a scream that echoed through the warehouse. He could feel himself going into shock already, the pain overwhelming and too familiar for him to try and fight back. It only took a few more hard blows – one of them to the side of his head – before Jason blacked out, pain dulling as unconsciousness took him.   
  


——-

  
  
Three days without sleep was pushing it, even for Batman, the  _real_  one anyway, and Dick Grayson hardly thought himself to be the real Batman even after a year or so under the damn near suffocating weight of his new mantle. Still, he had been staying fairly vigilant by Jason’s bedside sans cape and cowl, trying to keep himself from thinking about all the what-ifs and worst case scenarios. Sleep deprivation wasn’t really his thing, it was a Bruce thing, and starting to become a Tim thing, but in a situation like this Dick could definitely stop being the so called black sheep — though in this brood, he thought,  _it might be better to call himself the white sheep_  — and start getting used to the long sleepless hours in which days had blurred together so he could be present for every second that Jason could possibly need him, especially since he wasn’t there when it mattered the most.   
  
Even though Jason hadn’t woken up yet — it could happen, or it could never happen, with this level of physical trauma and the potential psychological trauma — Dick had already gotten Jason’s things from the apartment in the Narrows he had been squatting in, taking great care in setting them up around his rooms in the manor without letting Damian’s disapproving glower and huffing get to him. How the hell one kid managed to make so much noise without moving his lips still eluded Dick, even if they had been working together for about a year. He had known what was going on during the nights Dick had ducked out of the cave for a few hours on particularly slow nights, but he mostly refrained from saying anything out of some sort of respect for his mentor, and Dick liked it that way, it left him with only a minor sense of guilt about what Bruce would call “fraternizing with the enemy” (not that he was without sin, seeing as he had continued his more than professional relationship with a certain cat burglar while alive and well after returning from the grave.) Jason always had that smirk on his lips when Dick dropped into his apartment, the one that simultaneously asked “What took so long?” and stated “You’re late.” Dick managed to silence that smirk with a kiss once he had pulled the cowl off time and again before they tumbled into bed.   
  
Jason’s smirk was gone for now and would be for a while yet with how bruised and swollen his face was, to the point where he would be unrecognisable were it not for the shock of white in his hair and the bevy of scars that Dick knew by memory, ones he had traced lovingly with his fingers and tongue too many times to count. He had memorised every inch of Jason’s skin, starting from the first night they had hurriedly rutted in an alleyway, finding new scars each time they shared a bed, embedding them all into his memory through touch.   
  
Twenty four more sleepless and fretful hours later hadn’t changed much of anything, except Dick’s state of mind, which had declined into an endless barrage of guilt over not being the one to save Jason. Tim had found the pit Mask had buried him in, just a few miles away from the actual grave Jason had dug himself out of years before. His wounds this time hadn’t been much different, either. Bare nail beds had been bandaged so if – no not if,  _when_  – Jason woke up he wouldn’t damage his fingers even further. His head was carefully wrapped with some gauze where there was a particularly bad wound, stitched up by Alfred with surgical precision.   
  


——-

  
  
_There was a familiar and absolute darkness that made Jason’s insides clench with terror, and his fears were confirmed when he reached up and his aching hands hit cold, hard wood._    
  


——-

  
  
Before he caught himself doing it Dick was leaning in, lips brushing up against the sterile fabric while he whispered soft pleas for Jason to pull through and wake up, ones that had been repeated like a mantra since he had joined Jason at his bedside. He didn’t expect anything to come of it, nor did he expect that Jason could even hear him, not in his current state, but there was a subtle shift from the bed and an inhalation that was too deep to be regulated by the machinery Jason was hooked up to.   
  
Dick didn’t even have a chance to really register that Jason was awake before he was screaming, sending the machines surrounding him into a cacophonous symphony of beeping, orchestrating a full illustration of his panic. The first thing Dick concerned himself with was keeping Jason from struggling in the bed, knowing he was probably still in the mindset of needing to escape the coffin. Quiet shushes from Dick were lost in the hoarse noise of Jason’s screams as he made an attempt at keeping Jason’s arms down so he wouldn’t cause any more damage to himself.   
  


——-

  
  
_He screamed until his voice was raw and his throat burned, but it made no difference. There was no escaping, no matter how much he pushed or clawed at the coffin containing him. It was too small, too confined to give him enough power behind any pushes or hits to the lid, especially under the weight of the earth piled atop it._    
  


——-

  
  
“You’re safe, Jason. I promise you’re safe.” Dick knew restraining Jason’s movement wouldn’t exactly inspire an environment of safety for him, but it was necessary, and perhaps the only way he could get his point across. Wild green eyes clouded by panic widened briefly before Jason settled into a consistent, slow tremor that Dick easily recognised as a somewhat low grade panic attack. He knew from experience, this certainly wasn’t the first time that Jason had woken up screaming, but given the circumstances he wanted it over as quickly as possible. Of course he also knew that it wasn’t anywhere close to remotely possible, as much as he wished it to be, for Jason’s sake and maybe even a bit for his own. There were none of Dick’s usual quips that could bring the ghost of a smile to Jason’s lips, just silence that seeped into the heavy atmosphere already polluting the room. Groping for the right thing to say at the moment was futile even though Dick  _needed_  to say something, anything to make things just a little better.   
  
Instead, Jason broke the silence, trying once or twice to muster a voice that was actually audible before finally getting something out.   
  
“W-Where..?”   
  
“Batcave. Thought it would be best for all of the stuff we needed to hook you up to. Well, Tim thought it would be. I agreed. Damian just pouted. Think it was a good sign though.” Dick never seemed to grow out of his habit of babbling when he was in any sort of distress, even though he was sure that Batman didn’t babble. Or have nervous habits.   
  
“Brought some of your stuff over, from the apartment, y’know? You’re gonna have to stick around. Doctor’s orders and I think Alfred wants an excuse to be a mother hen to you. He’s got that look in his eye. Can’t refuse that sad old man look even if I wanted to. Are you—”   
  
“Stop.” Jason didn’t look angry, but the word came out more of a hard demand than a request, and it halted Dick without question.   
  
Dick slouched back into his chair and glanced away from Jason for a moment, hands wringing together for lack of anything better to do with them. “Sorry. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I was just really worried. We all were.”   
  
Jason didn’t reply, immediately, instead he observed his bandaged hands, frowning at them as his brow furrowed. “Cold,” he said after a while, eyes still glued to the pristine wrappings. “And… and dark.”   
  


——-

  
  
_The wood splintered against his fingertips, and in his panic, Jason barely noticed the skin splitting and his nails pulling away from their beds until drops of warm blood fell onto his face, making him scream again, despite the hoarse rasp that came out in lieu of his voice._    
  


——-

  
  
_His worst nightmares had been realised_ , Dick thought. A spark of anger ignited in him, along with the desire to severely punish whoever had a hand in the scheme. However, there were more important things to do right now, and Jason needed him to be there. As soon as the anger had flared, it was gone, replaced by the overwhelming need to comfort and care for Jason.   
  
“I think we can pool our collective resources to catch whoever did this, you know. Pretty sure everyone who knows is pretty pissed. Me included.” Jason’s focus on his fingers made Dick worried, afraid that it could send him spiralling into another panic attack. He reached out, curling his fingers over the bandaged ones and leaned in to kiss each one before nuzzling his palm.   
  
“Just rest for now, okay? I’ll stay with you tonight, and we can move you up to my room tomorrow. I wanna keep an eye on you. Hope you don’t mind.”   
  
The overly affectionate gesture from Dick didn’t have Jason pulling away like it normally would were he his usual self, and he shook his head slowly, the easiest way to convey that he was fine with Dick’s suggestion. Actually speaking, even finding the words for what he wanted to say was considerably more troublesome than it should have been, causing more distress for Jason. It was like his brain was working in slow motion, unable to supply anything complex regardless of what he wanted to think or say.   
  
“Mask,” Jason rasped, then repeated more urgently. “ _ **Mask**_.”   
  
“What did it look like?” The acrobat moved closer with none of his usual grace, more concerned with any information Jason could give him about who the perpetrator was.   
  
A frustrated groan was Jason’s initial response before he took as deep of a breath as his injured ribs would allow him in an attempt to gain some focus. “Mask,” he said again, slowly. “Ar-Ar…” Jason huffed, irritated by his inability to say a simple name, though he managed to force it out in a fit of pure will. “ _Arkham_.”   
  
Metal scraped loudly against the floor as Dick shot up from his chair, moving so quickly he nearly overturned it. Jason’s information was more than enough to present a strong possibility that Black Mask could be brought in tonight especially if all of their resources were utilised, and with Oracle at the helm of the operation, the probability was looking more like a certainty. “Wait here. Gotta get this to O. Promise you that I’m not gonna leave for long. I’m pretty sure that everyone can handle this without Batman making an appearance.”   
  
By the time Dick returned, Jason had settled into a slumber that was not necessarily peaceful, though it lacked any sign of the ghosts of his past haunting him. With the rest of the Batbrood mobilised for a man hunt Dick could settle back in, again taking the place next to Jason that he belonged in. A sense of calm had settled over him now that Jason had pulled through and was alive, and that was really the only thing he really needed in this world, even if Dick knew that the thought was stupidly romantic of him, though he was nothing if not a hopeless romantic — someone had to be after all and it wasn’t going to be Jason. All of the worries about rehabilitation could wait until tomorrow or even a few days later when everything had settled back into some semblance of routine.   
  


——-

  
  
_He was running out of air, and even in his panic he knew it. Even without his injuries it would be getting harder to breathe, and it made him lie still, staring up into the darkness with tears streaking through the blood on his face. Jason was resigned to his fate; it wasn’t like this was the first time Batman had let him die._    
  


——-

  
  
Hours later Dick had finally fallen asleep for the first time since Jason’s initial disappearance, a blanket mysteriously draped over his shoulders – no doubt from Alfred – and Jason was just glad that he’s still beside him. Though it took a bit of finagling, Jason managed to curl his fingers around Dick’s, a solid reminder that  _this_  Batman would never fail him, letting him slip back into a restful sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a commission we did for someone on tumblr.


End file.
